Now that Argul thought about it, there were a few other things beside the system that her daughter shouldn’t have been able to do if she couldn’t create original things such as the creation of multiple planes or layers of space. She didn’t think that Alyra would lie to her about something like that either, so perhaps she was just missing something.

A different part of Argul’s mind meanwhile noted that she was simply changing the subject to avoid an uncomfortable topic, but she didn’t stop herself and went ahead, asking her question.

Alyra simply shrugged after listening to her mother. “I can’t think of original things, that’s true. If you were to ask me to create a completely new story for you, then I couldn’t no matter how hard I try. I do have all of your memories however, so I could use different plots of stories you read and mesh them together into something new. The quality would be questionable at best though. So yeah, in essence, the more I know the more I can do which is exactly why I created the system.”

Argul nodded to herself and watched as Alyra pulled up the part of Aina that was drooping to the floor, only to put it into her lap. Her daughter’s explanation matched what she knew until now, though it seemed that Alyra was far from finished.

“As for the system…” She hummed thoughtfully. “I will have to explain what I am a bit more. You see, mana is an energy that has a consciousness, for the lack of a better term and it loves new unknown stuff. It isn’t sapient or anything like that, but more like bacteria.

Anyways, to differentiate between known and unknown it has to store the knowledge somewhere and this is what I call the archive. When I was born, created or whatever you want to call it, I was fused with that part of mana, so now I am the archive and the archive is me.”

Alyra paused for a moment to let Argul digest the information.

“To visualize it, I am a library with a personality that contains all knowledge ever known or discovered in the sphere of influence of mana.”

The metaphor was certainly fitting. Argul just thought that her daughter made for a bad librarian, not that she would tell her that.

“I don’t really know why, but I somehow have the ability to add and maintain side buildings to myself at the cost of a lot of mana and this is why I chose to shackle your core’s growth. The mana is used to maintain a secondary library that is open to the public and contains one book for each person, the system.”

This was where the metaphor became a bit lagging, but Argul thought she still got the gist of it. In essence, Alyra could increase her computing power and information storage capabilities beyond what was necessary for her existence at the cost of mana. She then used the new power to create a secondary server which hosted the system. That way she didn’t have to do any crazy mana shenanigans to create a universe-spanning, self contained system without the knowledge to do so. Instead, the system was still a part of herself and she could change it how she wanted. 

“Do you partition your mind or do you have to consciously manage the system all the time?” Argul couldn’t help but ask.

Her daughter wasn’t human, and after having been reminded of that earlier she thought it was better to ask directly.

Alyra shook her head in denial. “It’s not really like either of those two and more like the relation between an octopus and its tentacles. As long as I set some rules and a structure for the system a different, lesser part of me can manage it, only forwarding stuff to my main mind when it can’t solve something itself. Of course the two minds are not really separated and communicate on a subconscious level the whole time. It’s like even though you know cheese, you don’t think of cheese every single waking moment, only now that I mentioned it.”

Alyra flashed Argul a grin and she could tell that her daughter had wanted to do that last part for a while now based on how pleased she seemed with herself. That little fox of hers, she could only shake her head and smile.

“Okay, that explains how the system works and how you manage it, but how do you connect that to the user?”

“Ah, you remember that I am a part of mana?” Alyra looked at Argul for confirmation.”Well, that also allows me to invade their mana soul, as you call it, though it’s really just the equivalent of their being in the intangible realm of mana, and that’s how I or rather the system does stuff. The connection is really weak though, so even a small child can remove the system and I usually don’t bother to reconnect when someone doesn’t want help. I’m not the one losing anything, so it’s really not my problem.”

Argul listened amused to the ranting of her daughter. It only occurred to her now that Alyra was probably very annoyed every time someone rejected her grace and clearly wanted to share that with her, but because she had feared her reaction towards what she had done to her core, she had never been able to.

“I’m sure they will come to regret it when they see everyone else around them improve constantly.”

In Argul’s experience, the system was a lot less intrusive than some of the systems she had read about in novels, but because of that the help it provided was a lot less obvious during the first few months. 

In some stories the system actively took control over the body of the user or casted spells for them, but Alyra’s variant only gave you the feeling that you were doing something wrong and if you followed that feeling would give a vague hint of how to do it right, provided you had the skill and did something better at least once of course. Whether it was intentional or not didn’t matter. Getting the skill was another matter altogether as you had to acknowledge your proficiency in the matter subconsciously and faking it should be difficult because of Alyra’s oversight.

Anyway, this all mattered because if you didn’t know what the feeling meant, you could easily dismiss it as some illusion or weird tick of your brain. In that case the only thing the system provided was a safe way to level, increase your stats and seldomly, in a rare few cases, knowledge. Compared to the proficiency increase of pretty much every skill out there these were short term benefits that didn’t really influence society, at least as long as the mana density outside of Argul’s domain stayed at level 1 or below.

The earlier thought reminded Argul of something. “Hey Aly, how come you are able to guide a beings cultivation and how does it work?”

“Oh, that? Well, for a start I was able to observe how you core did things. Since you are made of solid mana, your mana soul and body are one and the same, so that gave me a good introduction in the matter. 

The difficulty is in applying that to other beings, not made of mana. I had to observe how things happened naturally and then apply the good outcomes to other individuals. It’s a work in progress to be honest and it comes at the expense of a few accidents, but otherwise I wouldn’t be able to avoid detrimental outcomes for the sapient species. As time goes on I and the system should be able to get better at cultivating mana for a being.”

Argul eyed her daughter cautiously. “What do those accidents look like?”

“Hmm…” Alyra took a moment to think about her answer and gave Argul a reproachful look. “Let me explain what an increase in stats, level and evolution actually is since you haven’t bothered observing it for yourself.”

Guilty as charged, Argul glanced down at Aina and gave the slime a pet to avoid the gaze of her daughter. She didn’t feel bad though, only embarrassed that she completely forgot about it.

“All three of them, stats, level and evolution, are phenomena of the mana soul. The only reason that the physical body of something might change due to them is that the mana soul and the body are intrinsically connected.” Alyra continued regardless of her mother’s reaction. She had already achieved the desired result before Argul’s body could move.

“A stat increase represents a quantitative change of mana in a specific part of the mana soul. A statpoint is basically a measurement unit representing a certain amount of mana.

Now, a statpoint usually doesn’t increase a beings mana pool, the only exception being the intelligence stat.”

Argul nodded along with her daughter's explanation. 

Following what Alyra had said, that would mean a being with a mana soul that only had one part or stat would always be stronger than one with more. Taking Argul herself as an example, one of her stat points was the equivalent of two human stat points because she only had half the amount of stats. To phrase it differently, the same amount of mana had 200% effect for her compared to a human.

“There are basically two ‘accidents’ that I have discovered for stat points. The first is a large imbalance between stats. Because mana soul and body are tight together, a change in the mana soul represents a change in capabilities of the physical body. An imbalance in this case could be harmless like having an insane amount of memory storage, but comparably slow thoughts. The other way around though, could cause you to overwhelm and fry your brain if you can’t control it. Both are avoidable in any case, so I have some amount of control to stop it.

The second ‘accident’ however, is something that I can only discourage but not stop. You see, a mana soul can only hold so much mana before it gets too much. A level can solve this problem, but it still means that you have a stat limit per level. That limit is different from being to being and species to species, for the system it doesn’t matter though, because it stops rewarding or cultivating stats a safe distance before the limit is reached. This doesn’t stop the being from cultivating itself however, something that often happens in nature when an animal, plant or mushroom is pressed for power to survive over a longer period. Examples for such threats are severe droughts or an extremely competitive and selective environment.”

Alyra paused to take a breath and Argul looked at her curiously. “What happens when you cultivate beyond the stat limit?”

Alyra frowned unhappily. “The mana soul breaks, but differently from death, it doesn’t release the mana back. Instead, it starts to actively and uncontrollably draw mana in as if it was starving. The results until now have always been the victims going absolutely feral and starting to kill everything around them for more mana and even worse, the more mana they absorb the stronger and the larger they become. What I mean is that an ant could grow as large as a dog, still be able to lift more than 100 times their weight and on top of that have the bonus of its stats. To put it simple, it would be an absolute monster with the potential to grow into a planet threatening disaster.”

Argul at first reacted to this news like people usually reacted to bad news from a far away country. It was bad, sure, but it was also difficult to feel affected by it beyond having a bit of pity for the people. The problem that most people hadn’t realized properly yet or stupidly didn’t care about, was that in such a globalized society as earth had been, everything affects everything in some abstruse way, so they should be a lot more troubled by things like child labour for example.

For Argul that meant she acknowledged the news, thought about it a minute longer, put it behind her and then idly note that she was a giant sphere made of crystalized mana that kept spewing out more and more of the stuff.

“Ohh fuck!” She exhaled with wide eyes. “What do I do?”

Alyra nodded at that. “Oh fuck indeed. Now, before you go into complete panic mode, it will likely take hundreds of years for a monster to become dangerous for you and, while I don’t encourage letting something become strong enough to challenge you, the easiest solution would perhaps be to create an inaccessible dungeon floor with the sole purpose of housing your core.”

Argul relaxed when she heard that, hoping not to have to deal with it. Sure, reading about and watching a fight was certainly exciting, but she would rather not do it herself.

“Can you do it?” She turned back to her daughter, who was behind the system and thus the creation and maintenance of her domain.

Alyra shook her head, the tension her mother felt entirely absent. “Nope, not for now at least. I can’t create one way portals for one and you need them because of the fate pact with Fia, the universe, to provide a way for mana to leave the floor without enabling things to reach said floor.

Two, I have no idea how to create a floor without a connection to another and or a two-way portal. Unless you manage to create that on your own I won’t be able to take over with the system.”

Argul looked dejected at that, but her daughter waved her off. “Don’t be like that mom. You will simply have to look into space magic a bit more, something you wanted to do anyway for a variety of reasons such as creating convenient storage containers and entering the fourth dimension. That would be pretty interesting by the way. We would have to research the fundamental laws of physics again, because things should work at least somewhat differently, going by how different the second and third-”

“Yes, yes. I understand.” Argul cut her off somewhat irritated. As if exploring new fields like that was easy!

She couldn’t be mad for long though. Her daughter wasn’t human and simply excited at the prospect of new knowledge. It was a bit like feeding her to be honest and Argul found it way too endearing for any bad feelings to linger.

“Let’s get back to the topic.” She sighed. “I think you still have to explain levels, evolutions and their accidents.”

Alyra’s excitement deflated slightly at that. “Oh, that? Sure, why not. I don’t have much to explain there anyway.

Let’s start with levels. Levels are, simply put, a qualitative change of the mana soul that gives a small stat increase, but more importantly increases the amount of stat points it can hold. I’ve seen a lot of things go wrong here and I’m pretty sure I haven’t discovered it all yet. The most common are losing a level and injuring your mana soul, which subsequently makes you unable to cultivate in the future.

Ahh, but it’s different for you because of your nature. I’m not even sure if you have a statpoint limit, but I implemented it just to be safe. Anyway, for you a level is simply a slight compression of your core. Not sure what it does, but your core did so parallel to growing, only a lot slower, before I put my shackles on you.”

It was quite clear to Argul that Alyra wasn’t interested in keeping up the conversation anymore now that she thought of something different. She didn’t mind though. It was already late and it was probably better not to leave Mia alone for too long.

“As for what evolution does, I’m not really sure yet. I know that there is a limit to levels much like there is for stat points and evolution solves that, but there is apparently more than one method to do so. The sample size I have is way too small and I only know two methods yet.

One is another qualitative change of the mana soul, but this time it increases the potency of the mana. The second is to bring the physical body and the mana soul closer together. This one results in changes of the body to varying degrees.

I have no idea what determines how your mana soul evolves, it’s potentially random, and I know that there are more than the two I told you about because a few animals attempted different things, but until now that has always resulted in an explosion of the mana soul, so yeah, I’m still waiting.”

Silence descended upon the pair now that Alyra finished her explanation. What had originally started as a confession had somehow turned into a lesson about cultivation and mana. It was all very interesting though, in one case threatening, and Argul would need a bit of time to think about it all. 

She was quite happy with how things went though and the conversation had given her insight into a topic she had overlooked entirely, showing her how important it was for more than one mind to research something. It reinforced her desire to share her knowledge with everyone else, it was kind of meaningless if only she knew it, like a story only known to the author.

Argul just didn’t know how to do it and she couldn’t just give the knowledge to one person and expect it to spread. People were way too selfish for that. She didn’t want to reenter human society either, because it was something that played a major role in her depression, so she couldn’t just start an organization or teach publicly either. Hopefully Alyra had some kind of plan for her.

Argul looked up at her daughter who was lost in her own world, probably slobbering all over knowledge about the fourth dimension. Perhaps now was not a good time to bring that up.

Shaking her head, she put her half of Aina back into her daughter’s lap. Then she leaned in and kissed Alyra on her cheek. “Goodnight love. Thanks for the talk and your honesty. I’ll go and make sure Mia is okay.”

Her daughter mumbled back a barely audible goodnight, leaving Argul staring and smiling at her before she turned around and left her behind, idly wondering how many plants and animals didn’t receive her daughter's help for her to gather that knowledge. She wasn’t disgusted or anything, it was the natural state of their new reality after all. It was more of a morbid curiosity.

Thus, Argul went to bed thinking about genocidal animals and exploding plants.